Raise Your Mug to This

By Mike Unger

From Benjamin Franklin to Homer Simpson, Americans have
always loved their beer. The Brewers Association, a national trade group,
reported in September that the number of breweries in the country had surpassed
4,000, approaching a historical high. Brooklyn's Braven Brewing Company is one
of the newcomers. Founded in 2013 by Marshall
Thompson, CAS/BA '03, and Eric Feldman, whom he first met in his Anderson
Hall dorm room, the company makes ales and pilsners that are distributed across
New York City and its suburbs.

Braven's roots can be traced back to Feldman's kitchen,
where the friends started with a $200 homebrew kit that produced a "pretty
decent" nut brown ale. "Over the next three years we just kept doing it and getting
better and better," Thompson says. In 2013 they used $23,000 from a Kickstarter
campaign to start the company. Their beer is brewed (using their recipes) at
the Old Saratoga Brewery and is distributed to about 1,200 bars, restaurants,
and retail outlets.

Their ultimate goal is to open their own brewery in
Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood, once an epicenter of beer making. "At one
point Brooklyn was making 10 percent of the country's beer, but that history
has been kind of forgotten," Thompson says. "Our goal is to be the first
brewery in Bushwick in over 40 years, and to bring back the brewing tradition
that made Bushwick famous."

We'll raise our mug to that.

Sip on this: Which of these states has the most breweries per capita?

A) Massachusetts

B) Wisconsin

C) California

D) Texas

Just ask Bernie Brewer, mascot of baseball's Milwaukee Brewers: folks from the Badger State love their suds. The correct answer is B.